Grimogen Darkstar Bat-Cat-Tastrophe and #ukteenchat

October was a very busy month for me, with lots of writing and art each day. It was also a strange switch round of roles on my chat - #ukteenchat - where I became the guest rather than host. The lovely Emma Bradley was kind enough to host my chat, and you can see our questions and answers below...

1, Could you tell us a little bit about your new book, Grimogen Darkstar Bat-Cat-Tastrophe, please?

It’s a story about a little grim reaper, with a wild imagination who loves animals and really wants her first pet. But she’s got to prove that she’s ready for the responsibility, which leads to chaos and fun at Howler’s Rescue Centre. It’s a bit of a magical version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

2, Was there anything in particular that inspired Grimogen Darkstar?

Grimogen was inspired by my love of all things spooky and gothic, combined with a passion for animals, and the fun you can have when you bring magic into the mix, and magical animal combinations, for example: Bat-Cats and Unipugs.

 

3, Did you need to research anything for Grimogen Darkstar?

The main research I had to do for Grimogen was looking at different mythical creatures, and also non magical creatures that would likely be in Grimogen’s world. Of course, this meant getting distracted by pictures of cute cats and dogs!

 

4, Bat-Cats are obviously a favourite magical creature of yours, but if you could foster a magical pet what would it be?

Ever since I was at junior school and discovered them in a story, I have wanted my own phoenix. I’ve been absolutely obsessed with them ever since. Though weirdly they don’t actually feature in any of my stories so far…

 

5, You’ve written for both younger and older children, do you find changing between the age groups tricky or have a preference between them?

I like the freedom that comes from having very different and distinct voices to write in. The younger books are fun and hopeful with plenty of magic and sparkle, and also incredibly tight on the word count. Then my older stories, whilst usually still have magic, they are much darker in tone, and it’s nice to write in quite a lyrical way and have more words to play with, and also bring a little romance to stories too.

 

6, This is your first book where you’re also the illustrator, how did you find the process?

To be honest, I was terrified when Tiny Tree first asked me to illustrate too. Whilst I created art regularly, I had never tried to illustrate a book before, so I didn’t know if I even could. But it was really interesting learning the process and getting requests for specific scenes or characters and then I’d go off and decide exactly how and what to draw. It’s amazing to see things that existed in my head go from paper to iPad and then into a book!

 

7, Are you a plotter or pantser?

I was once firmly in the pantser camp, and now the more I write, the more I like to have some sort of roadmap in place before I get started. But there’s still plenty of room for discovery writing along the way.

 

8, Do you have any writing rituals or a favourite place to write?

I actually have a lovely writing desk I got from a charity shop, but I write more sat on the settee, and I’m always much more productive with a cup of tea, especially in one of my favourite mugs.

 

9, Can you tell us anything about what you’re currently working on?

Currently, I’m not under contract with this one, bit I’m working on a dark YA, that may or may not feature phoenix in some way.

 

10, Do you have any writing advice or tips you’d like to share?

Read as much as you can in all sorts of age groups and genres, but particularly read books released in recent years to get a feel for current voices. I know it’s said a lot, but my biggest tip is always going to be find writing buddies, join a writing group, in person or online, they are the only people who totally get what you’re going through and will be there on the rollercoaster with you.

You can get your own copy of Grimogen Darkstar from most bookshops now:

Grimogen Darkstar: Bat-cat-tastrophe: A Spooky and Magical Story for Animal Lovers Aged 7 to 11: A Young Girl's Quest for a Pet Leads to Moonlit Mayhem! : Finlayson-Palmer, Emma: Amazon.co.uk: Books

GRIMOGEN DARKSTAR: BAT-CAT-TASTROPHE : A Young Girl's Quest for a Pet Leads to Moonlit Mayhem!: Emma Finlayson-Palmer: 9780722355886: hive.co.uk

GRIMOGEN DARKSTAR: BAT-CAT-TASTROPHE by Emma Finlayson-Palmer | Waterstones

Notes from the Graveyard Shift

Welcome to the graveyard shift!

Finally pressed send on my new Substack and posted my first Notes from the Graveyard Shift, which will hopefully be a regular thing now.

It's something I've been thinking about writing for some time now, and October 1st seems a very fitting day to release the first one.

You can check it out here: NOTES FROM THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT

Winging it's way to bookshops near you this September!

 Finally I can shout about my new book... Grimogen Darkstar - Bat-Cat-Tastrophe

publishing with Tiny Tree Books

Coming out on the 18th September!

You can pre-order from:

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3G1OxOx

Waterstones: https://bit.ly/3TtNVUO

https://www.hive.co.uk/.../GRIMOGEN-DARKSTAR-BAT.../31715247

WriteMentor Summer Mentoring Programme

I'm thrilled to be taking part in WriteMentor's summer mentoring programme this year. Here's some important dates, and information about me and what I'll be looking out for this year.

The key dates:

Mentors announced: 24th March

Applications open: 7-11th April

Mentoring begins: 1st May to 30th August

Submission Package Draw: 1st May

Agent Showcase: 1st September

There will be a chance to ask mentors questions over on Twitter/X and also Instagram on Tues 1st April and Weds 2nd both evenings it will be between 7 and 8pm BST. I'll be at the Tuesday chat, but happy to answer questions anytime about the mentoring scheme, just ask :)

A little about me...

I'm a working class, autistic author and artist who lives in the West Midlands with my partner and a multitude of children and cats! I run #ukteenchat, a writing themed chat on Twitter; I have been a mentor for #WriteMentor since its inauguration, and am one half of Word Witches, an editing and mentoring business. When I'm not writing, I can usually be found painting, watching birds or wandering around graveyards, often all three simultaneously. 

I am primarily a writer of fiction for children, including my series for 5-8 year olds, Autumn Moonbeam, reading scheme books for OUP, and an upcoming young fiction story coming out in September 2025, which will be my first time illustrating as well as writing the book. My current MG placed in competitions last year and won third place in the Wells Lit Fest. You can find some of my YA and adult short stories and flash fiction online.

I have been writing and sending my words out into the world for a long, long time, and have learnt a lot over the years. I’ve been very fortunate to get advice and encouragement along the way from some fantastic writers and other writing industry people, and being part of the fantastic writing community both #WriteMentor and beyond, and I would love to share my experience and knowledge with other writers, and help get them get going in the right direction. I’m incredibly positive and optimistic, a silver lining in every cloud sort of writer, and would like to bring that to my mentoring.

I’m looking for a mentee who is keen to learn tips and tricks to help with their writing journey, both the writing side and navigating the rollercoaster ride that is the publishing industry. Someone who is open to edits, and wants to make their words sparkle. Happy to work with pantsers or plotters, but I can definitely help with some tips for the pantsers out there. But mostly, I just would like to work with a writer who is passionate about their story and wants to work together to make it shine!

I've been very lucky to work with some amazing writers in the past who have gone on to win competitions and be published, and to be part of such an amazing writing community with WriteMentor.

Genres: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Contemporary, Historical, Romance, Thriller, Mystery, Dystopian, Humour/Funny, Horror, Paranormal, Crime, Magical Realism, Time-Travel, Action/Adventure - basically, I love all sorts of genres :) 

To find out more about the programme and how you can apply, have a look at the WriteMentor website here: WriteMentor 2025: Meet the Mentors - WriteMentor

Social Media

Social media handles...

Blog: Emma Finlayson-Palmer

Twitter: @FinlaysonPalmer

Instagram: @finlayson_palmer 

TikTok: @EmFinlaysonPalmer

Bluesky: Emma Finlayson-Palmer (@finlaysonpalmer.bsky.social) — Bluesky

Skeletal Trees

I couldn't settle down to sleep last night until I'd painted something, and for some reason these skeletal trees were just begging me to paint them...

#ukteenchat Interview with Adam Connors

 #ukteenchat Interview with Adam Connors

Welcome to my stop on the blog tour, I am thrilled to be taking part with the tour for Adam Connors fantastic new book - FIND ME AFTER - out on 4th July 2024. This is the second book by Adam, and equally as brilliant as his first book, THE GIRL WHO BROKE THE SEA.

I'm excited to be sharing my Q&A with Adam, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have...

Could you tell us a little bit about your new YA Thriller Romance, Find Me After, please?

My main character, Kyle, wakes from an epileptic seizure to find that the world is … different. People flicker in and out of sight, buildings tremble and threaten to slip out of existence. In the ordinary world, Kyle is still having a seizure, but his brain activity is spiking and, like a near-death experience, it’s creating an alternative world, another version of reality.

Kyle ends up calling it the Stillness, and the point is that it isn’t a hallucination, it’s just a different rendering of reality. It’s not less real, it’s more real than the world we’re used to.

Was there anything in particular that inspired Find Me After?

I wrote the opening chapter of Find Me After on the kitchen floor, waking up after a seizure. I wanted to capture some of the fraught energy of a seizure, that feeling of “coming back”. The few minutes after a seizure always feels like a kind of hinterland, as if my brain is shifting gears, as if something still has hold of my ankle and is trying to drag me back. That’s where the story starts.

Did you need to research anything for Find Me After?

Lots! I didn’t want to write about a supernatural “afterlife” or purgatory, I felt like that had been done before and it would be too easy to slip into well-trodden territory. I’d been reading about this idea in neuroscience that the brain doesn’t just experience reality, it constructs it. Neuroscience is going through a bit of a renaissance at the moment, new imaging technology and data processing capability is changing the field dramatically.

Neuroscientists talk about our daily experiences as a “controlled hallucination” and there’s a growing body of hard physical evidence to back this up.

So I thought: if this world is partly a hallucination, maybe a traumatised brain could construct a different (but no less real) version of reality.

For me, that kind of background is what gives me the confidence and level of detail I need to make the world feel real, and it opens up lots of directions that I wouldn’t have thought of if I’d just seen the world as something supernatural.

Without being too spoilery, is there a specific scene or character that you really enjoyed writing in Find Me After?

Jonah is by far my favourite character. He’s the main antagonist and he’s kind of a nasty piece of work. But he’s a kind of “take control” which Kyle can’t help but find slightly alluring. He’s a bit of a force of nature, almost animalistic, and that is very much not me, so it was a lot of fun to write.

 

Do you feel your approach to writing or editing has changed the more books you write?

Yes, definitely. I used to get really bogged down on the first chapter (maybe the first page). I used to think: if I can just get this right everything else will fall into place. But it never did, I just wrote and rewrote and never got past the first 20K words.

One day I realised that the best thing I could do was write all the way through to the end. Once I have a dirty first draft, it’s much easier to see what the book is really about, and then go back and write that.

I actually did the maths for my last book, The Girl Who Broke The Sea: I figured out that I wrote about 250K words to get my 80K novel. I basically deleted two words for every word I kept, which is much more efficient than it felt at the time.

I haven’t checked Find Me After but I think the ratio will be smaller.

Have you always written YA, or do you write for other age groups?

I did an MA at City University and wrote an adult book as part of that, but it wasn’t good enough and it didn’t find a home. Then I wrote short-stories for a while because it was easier to fit around two young children. When my son was about 8 or 9 I realised that I was spending all this time writing things that he couldn’t enjoy, so I switched to middle-grade.

My first book was middle-grade and won Undiscovered Voices and allowed me to sign with my agent. My second book started out as middle-grade, but my editor at Scholastic pointed out that I really wanted to write YA, I just hadn’t realised it.

He was right.

For now at least I think YA is my sweet-spot. There’s enough freedom to build in ideas that are sufficiently sophisticated that adult readers can enjoy them as well, but YA also doesn’t take itself too seriously, and there’s still room to put things in that are just … cool.

Besides, my 8 year old is now 16.

Do you have any writing rituals, go to writing snacks, or a favourite place to write?

I have two very, very large monitors. Vast. And I’d have more if my desk would hold them. I like to have my writing document quite small (laptop sized) and then about ten other windows around it with notes and pinterest pages. I share my writing room with my partner so I can’t stick things to the wall, so my screens are my thought palace.

Are you a plotter or pantser?

Mostly a pantser. There’s a line from an old insurance advert I always think about when I’m writing: You don’t know what you’re made of until you’ve had the stuffing knocked out of you.

That’s mostly how I write, I knock the stuffing out of my characters in order to figure out what they’re made of.

That said, I usually have a pretty good idea of where the next third of the book is going and I tend to write that down in note form. The best feeling is when the next block comes into view and something about it surprises me. That’s when I feel like it’s probably good.

Can you tell us anything about what you’re currently working on?

I’d love to write a follow-up to Find Me After. There’s a lot of interesting stuff I’d like to play around with in Kyle and Jonah’s relationship. Imagine, Kyle has always felt controlled by his epilepsy, and in contrast Jonah is almost animalistic in his instinct to dominate the world he’s trapped in. I think Kyle might end up a bit conflicted in that relationship.

There’s a whole science experiment going on in the Stillness as well that needs to be finished off.

Do you have any writing advice or tips you’d like to share?

Hemingway had the right answer: “Writing is rewriting.” I go over and over the words, I delete ruthlessly and rewrite. Every time I sit down to write, I tend to start a page or two back and rewrite the words I wrote the day before. I probably waste a lot of time adding and removing commas, but being willing to rewrite so readily reminds me that the words are actually the least important part of a book — they need to be good enough to get out of the way and not jar the reader out of the illusion, but ideally the reader isn’t thinking about the words, they’re thinking about the characters, and the story, and the world. 

FIND ME AFTER - Out on the 4th July from Scholastic 

Paperback • 9780702331367 • £8.99 • 14+

Available from all bookshops, including: HIVE

Do check out all the other blog stops this week...